Robotic Farming

To solve the reported food security crisis, there is an increasing awareness that it is to science we must turn. Certainly in UK agriculture, the 'Agri-tech' agenda is very popular and now approaching the main stream.

Indeed, BSc Land Management students this week visited Trevor Griffin at Middle Field Farm, Hinckley who owns an innovative milking parlour for his dairy herd - a robotic dairy! With dairy farming feeling the pinch, this approach enables significant efficiencies to made in production costs - and all can be monitored from the convenience of Trevor's phone! Cows enter the milking sheds where they are scanned by the robots and milked without any human assistance - you can read about his technology here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-14596166

With an additional talk from David Whatoff from SOYL - who develop precision farming technologies - there is evidently room for traditional and non-traditional methods to promote the idiom of 'sustainable intensification' in agriculture.

Plate 1: Robotic milking set up